Demographics of the Supreme Court of the United States

[2] The 20th century saw the first appointment of justices who were Jewish (Louis Brandeis, 1916), African-American (Thurgood Marshall, 1967), female (Sandra Day O'Connor, 1981), and Italian-American (Antonin Scalia, 1986).

[10] David M. O'Brien notes that "from the appointment of John Rutledge from South Carolina in 1789 until the retirement of Hugo Black [from Alabama] in 1971, with the exception of the Reconstruction decade of 1866–1876, there was always a southerner on the bench.

"[11] The westward expansion of the U.S. led to concerns that the western states should be represented on the court as well, which purportedly prompted William Howard Taft to make his 1910 appointment of Willis Van Devanter of Wyoming.

[27] Both of Justice Cardozo's parents descended from Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula who fled to Holland during the Spanish Inquisition, then to London, before arriving in New York prior to the American Revolution.

[43] Sonia Sotomayor – nominated by President Barack Obama on May 26, 2009, and sworn in on August 8 – is the first Supreme Court Justice of Latin American descent.

[48][49] The possibility of an Hispanic justice returned during the George W. Bush Presidency, with various reports suggesting that Emilio M. Garza,[50] Alberto Gonzales,[51] and Consuelo M. Callahan[52] were under consideration for the vacancy left by the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor.

Some historians contend that Cardozo – a Sephardic Jew whose grandfather is believed to be of distant Portuguese descent[61] – should also be counted as the first Hispanic Justice.

[1] Schmidhauser wrote in 1979 that "among the large ethnic groupings of European origin which have never been represented upon the Supreme Court are the Italians, Southern Slavs, and Hispanic Americans.

[63] However, Segal and Spaeth state: "Though it is often claimed that no Hispanics have served on the Court, it is not clear why Benjamin Cardozo, a Sephardic Jew of Spanish heritage, should not count."

In 2007, the Dictionary of Latino Civil Rights History also listed Cardozo as "the first Hispanic named to the Supreme Court of the United States.

"[64] The nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, widely described in media accounts as the first Hispanic nominee, drew more attention to the question of Cardozo's ethnicity.

According to a 2019 report of the Center for American Progress,[67] among active federal judges serving on U.S. courts of appeals, 10 were Asian-Americans, equal to the proportion as in the overall U.S. population (5.7 percent).

[78] Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed Allen to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in 1934—making her "one of the highest ranking female jurists in the world at that time".

[88] William Rehnquist was a widower for the last fourteen years of his service on the court, his wife Natalie having died on October 17, 1991, after suffering from ovarian cancer.

[90] G. Harrold Carswell was unsuccessfully nominated by Richard Nixon in 1970 and was convicted in 1976 of battery for making an "unnatural and lascivious" advance to a male police officer working undercover in a Florida men's room.

But he produces no evidence to support any of these possibilities, except to note that friends, in describing Cardozo, used words like "beautiful", "exquisite", "sensitive" or "delicate.

[99] More recently, when David Souter was nominated to the court, "conservative groups expressed concern to the White House ... that the president's bachelor nominee might conceivably be a homosexual".

The religious beliefs of James Wilson, one of the earliest justices, have been the subject of some dispute, as there are writings from various points of his life from which it can be argued that he leaned towards Presbyterianism, Anglicanism, Thomism, or Deism; it has been deemed likely that he eventually favored some form of Christianity.

[110] Baptist denominations and other evangelical churches have been underrepresented on the court relative to the population of the United States, and entirely unrepresented since the retirement of Methodist Harry Blackmun in 1994.

During Benjamin Cardozo's swearing in ceremony McReynolds pointedly read a newspaper muttering "another one" and did not attend that of Felix Frankfurter, exclaiming "My God, another Jew on the Court!

In 2010, the confirmation of President Barack Obama's nomination of Elena Kagan to the court created the possibility that three Jewish justices would serve simultaneously.

[145] In 1975, Attorney General Edward H. Levi had listed Dallin H. Oaks, a Mormon who had clerked for Earl Warren and was then president of Brigham Young University, as a potential nominee for Gerald Ford.

[152] The longest period of time in which one group of justices has served together occurred from August 3, 1994, when Stephen Breyer was appointed to replace the retired Harry Blackmun, to September 3, 2005, the death of Rehnquist, totaling 11 years and 31 days.

[153] Commentators have noted that advances in medical knowledge "have enormously increased the life expectancy of a mature person of an age likely to be considered for appointment to the Supreme Court".

[170] In December 1969, while a sophomore at Princeton, Samuel Alito received a low lottery number of 32 in the Selective Service drawing, increasing his chances of getting drafted into the war.

[176] Alito was commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Army Reserve in 1972, but did not begin his military duties until after graduating from law school in 1975, after the war in Vietnam had ended.

[176] The financial position of the typical Supreme Court Justice has been described as "upper-middle to high social status: reared in nonrural but not necessarily urban environment, member of a civic-minded, politically active, economically comfortable family".

"[181] John Rutledge was elected Governor of South Carolina at a time when the Constitution of that state set, as a qualification for the office, ownership of "a settled plantation or freehold ... of the value of at least ten thousand pounds currency, clear of debt".

[182] Oliver Ellsworth "rose rapidly to wealth and power in the bar of his native state" with "earnings... unrivalled in his own day and unexampled in the history of the colony", developing "a fortune which for the times and the country was quite uncommonly large".

[186] Historian Howard Zinn, in his 1980 book A People's History of the United States, argues that the justices cannot be neutral in matters between rich and poor, as they are almost always from the upper class.